Chocolate Souffle & English Cream Puffs; Theobroma Chocolate Lounge, Pavilion KL

A vocabulary lesson for the edification of Theobroma Chocolate Lounge
(If I sound vitriolic and thus pedantic and patronizing, I apologize. It's because I AM.)

What Theobroma is guilty of committing:

(the fallacy of) misnomer \mis-NO-muhr\, noun
Any misnaming of a person or thing; also, a wrong or inapplicable name or designation.

Words that Theobroma is evidently ignorant/sadly mistaken about, which is somewhat disturbing seeing as it is not only supposed to be a highly specialized dessert place, but is also an restaurant chain originating from an English-speaking country:

souffle (dessert) \SOO-fley, soo-FLEY\, noun
A light, airy baked dish made fluffy with beaten egg whites combined with egg yolks and other ingredients, typically lemon or chocolate. Will "fall" after 20-30 minutes so should be served and eaten quickly.
Derived from the French verb souffle which means "to blow up" or puff up--which is what happens to this combination of custard and egg whites.

profiterole \pro-fit-er-OLE\, noun
A small hollow choux pastry that is typically filled with cream and covered with chocolate.

Desserts that Theobroma misnamed:

i) Chocolate Souffle with strawberries


ii) English Cream Puffs with chocolate and strawberries


What The Desserts Really Were, To Anyone With Half a Brain Or Access to Google, Which Clearly Excludes the Theobroma Management:

i) A rock hard, carved slab of chocolate, which is fine if you really feel like satisfying your craving for a chocolate brick but NOT FINE when you order a souffle! Come on, Theobroma! What is this? You can't tag fancy French names onto desserts that are pretty much the complete antithesis of what you're describing just because they sound pretentious and chocolate lounge-y! What are you, the Restaurant of Opposites and Irony?!


ii) Profiteroles. This one was just redundant. Profiteroles = tiny cream puffs with melted chocolate drizzled over them. Therefore in the interests of efficiency, economy and accuracy in general, I'm proposing a novel idea: call a spade a spade and english cream puffs with melted chocolate on them profiteroles. Revolutionary and ingenious, I know. Please try not to fall off your chair in shock.


I was too huffy to enjoy the chocolate "souffle" but in spite of that I LOVED the "cream puffs with chocolate". Even though they were tiny and you only get four and it was sort of like eating a mistaken identity. I really, really didn't want to share, but goosey kept repeating that he'd only help me eat dessert if I insisted (obviously, in hopes that I would insist). Luckily I am a generous and kind person and insisted, albeit reluctantly (also he once gave me a lot of shit after I said I wasn't going to share my Cheezels and then couldn't finish them and had to ask him to help finish them; I wasn't about to risk a repeat of that). Also X Files sucks balls, please don't watch it.

Triple Layer Cheesecake; Coffee Bean

The godfather grand duke monster of cheesecakes: not one, not two, but THREE different types of cheesecake squished into one slice! Naturally, the moment I laid eyes upon it I knew I had to have it. It's my exotic mishmash Everest! My dessert Godzilla! My gentle creamy giant! As a huge believer (pun intended) in the adage that size matters (wait... except when it comes to my size or lack thereof... that's different) and more is not always less, this cake is IT. THE cake.
Unfortunately, as is the case with many things in life, the idea works better in theory than practice. In practice, it turns out, combining a classic cheesecake with a mocha cheesecake with an oreo cheesecake produces a dessert that appears to be suffering from a kind of identity crisis and oreo-measles. Evidently three kinds of cake cannot coexist in one slice. I thought it was interesting, at first, to be able to get three flavours in one bite, and then I tasted the distinct flavour of ginger. Seriously. Ginger. In a Cheesecake. I can only assume this was some chemical reaction gone awry in regards to the combination of mocha and oreos, but it was totally weird. 10 marks for creativity, 2 for execution; more is not always better.

Curry Chicken Pie, Caramel Eclair, Macaroons; Bakerzin, Singapore

Lost 1 kg in Singapore as my stomach seems to be so contrarian that it just defies the laws of gastrophysics, prompting my mother to comment somewhat ominously that I should enjoy the metabolism while I can. This sounds like a threat. Since my standard procedure in dealing with threats is to yell out 'bring it on, mofos' while wielding a metaphorical M-16, I will take this maternal comment as license to consume more fatty foods.

Curry Chicken Pie!

Caramel Eclair (I LOVE LOVE LOVE eclairs. LOVE. I would MARRY an eclair if I could. Which if you think about it is very fitting because an eclair is pretty explicit phallic symbol and like men, good eclairs are hard to find. They look fine when you're looking at them through the display window, but then you find out you were cheated on the cream or the pastry is just too hard and then you're like I divorce you! And by divorce I mean go to the bathroom and get rid of the... you know what I mean.)

Macaroons! Strawberry, Chocolate, Pistachio, Rose Chocolate (yeah... I don't know what that means either, but it tasted good?), Hazelnut, Vanilla

Dessert Buffet; Ritz-Carlton, Singapore

The following post is why one should not ever give me access to buffets with generous dessert spreads. I do not have a large enough appetite to eat both savoury AND sweet foods, so when given the choice between something savoury and substantial and something sweet and completely unhealthy, I will of course choose the latter.

Thus I literally stuffed myself to bursting point and seriously almost fell into a weird hybrid of a sugar rush-food coma after lunch. This was not good considering I was sitting right next to my boss in the post-lunch meetings and the only reason I was in Singapore was to attend work conferences, and not, as my stomach had managed to make me forget, to eat like a heifer.

White Chocolate Cake with Raspberries

Blueberry & Chocolate Pudding

Chocolate & Pineapple Cake (sounds like an intriguing combination, but turned out to be neither intriguing nor tasty)

Classic Cheesecake (with a crumbly cookie base: MY FAVOURITE KIND OF CHEESECAKE BASE and one that is surprisingly difficult to find)

Raspberry, Strawberry, Blueberry Berry Cake

Espresso Ice Cream
Vanilla Creme Brulee
Raspberry Pudding

Lemon Meringue Pie
Caramelized Pear
Raspberry Sorbet (I made Mr. Ice Cream Scooper pick out all the raspberry fruit chunks to put in my scoops of ice cream. It ended up taking him ten minutes to put the above concoction together. I'm sorry, Mr. Ice Cream Scooper)

Bread & Butter Pudding (absolute FILTH. Seriously. I couldn't eat more than two bites. How the hell does a six star hotel mess up a bread and butter pudding, by definition the most rudimentary of all puddings? For shame, Ritz Carlton, for shame)

Lemon Pudding with Meringue Topping

I have no idea what this is but seeing as it was on the dessert bar and my mission of the day was to clean out the entire dessert selection, I ate it anyway. Is that disturbing? Yes, more than slightly. Is that surprising? No, not at all.

I Heart Babies

I know this is a food blog, and I am not REALLY a baby-eater a la the witch who tried to devour Hansel and Gretel. This is more a metaphorical yumminess of the 'this baby is so cute she makes me geram and thus want to gobble her up' sort, with a smattering of 'she is so deliciously cute I want to cium her all day', and a dash of 'her hot pink jammies make me think of candy (but not think of HER as candy)'.

SOOOO GERAM! Barely three weeks old and you already have your picture plastered on cyberspace... you are clearly a member of the internet generation. Also just to reiterate, Khala Iman does not want to eat you for real, okay. Just metaphorically.

Strawberry Cheesecake, Creme Brulee; Oriel, Bangsar

Pbil and I tried to go out for cupcakes but apparently almost every cupcake place in KL is closed on Mondays (true story; google it if you don't believe me). Whyyy, cupcake places, whyyy? Is this a coincidence or a flagrant oversight on the part of the majority of KL cupcake producers? Because it makes no business sense to shut your store on a day during which the masses will be tired and weary, in desperate need of a sugary pick-me-up with which to gather strength to face the remaining four days of the work week.

Fortunately we found some cake anyway, though I had to resort to that tried and trusted favourite, cheesecake. Also fortunately, pbil let me eat some of his creme brulee (most probably in an effort to gain brownie points with me... get it? Did you see the dessert pun there?!).

Clearly someone reads this blog and is aware that the way to my heart (which is connected to my sister's, obvi, cause I am her favourite and she loves me soooo much) is my tummy. Well played, homie, well played.

Chocolate Moist; Alexis, Bangsar

Was not moist. At all. In fact, should have been called Chocolate Dry-and-Crumbles-In-Your-Mouth instead.

I am ashamed to admit I enjoyed it anyway, because you can pretty much drip hot melted chocolate over anything and I will instantly and automatically become a fan. An even better idea would have been to not bake the cake at ALL (seeing as the highlight of the dessert was actually the melted chocolate, it wouldn't have been a huge loss) and leave it as batter. Then the whole THING would be a veritable soup of Chocolate Moist and the decision to become aqueous would be the cake's way of rebelling against its previously deceptive "moist"-but-in-actuality-dry-as-sandpaper form by going the extreme in the other direction. I realize that salmonella is an unpleasant disease and one should not make a habit of eating raw eggs, sugar and cocoa powder, but I blame this perverse addiction on my former maid, who was either unaware of salmonella or was trying to poison me because I would smack her butt fifty times a day for fun. Whenever she made cake she'd ply my sisters and me with cake batter. Also she would make us fight for it. In retrospect this behaviour seems very suspect. I probably didn't notice it at the time because I was too busy licking bowls of cake batter.

I Heart Olives

Apparently pregnant Ashlee Simpson is craving green olives. And Minnie Driver craved for and dreamed of "giant olives" while SHE was pregnant, and Katie Holmes wanted cupcakes all the time.

I point this out because:-
i) it has just occurred to me that cravings and the indulgence of cravings are superb reasons to which one can look forward while pregnant (apart from the obvious bringing into this world another human life produced by you and (hopefully, but you never know in these liberal, marriage-eschewing times) your spouse) reason. You can crave anything! And you'll have an excuse to demand your food of choice anytime you want it! "I want a jar of olives NOW! What, you said no? Did it slip your mind that I am currently a receptacle and incubator for a living, breathing, innocent creation of God that I will eventually have to eject from a 2 inch wide orifice? Yeah. THOUGHT SO.";
ii) this shared love of green olives means I have something in common with Ashlee Simpson in addition to the fact that both of us are unable to sing at all;
iii) Minnie Driver has impressed me. Giant olives! I applaud your food-minded imagination and now like you (I started disliking her during Good Will Hunting because I was jealous that she got to be Matt Damon's love interest. Both on- AND off-screen... some people are just lucky);
iv) I wonder what I'll crave if I ever become pregnant, seeing as I pretty much want to eat all those things all the time now anyway. My cravings will probably and ironically consist of foods I loathe right now. Like coconuts and green peas and Malay kuih and Pepsi and above all, catfish. URGGHHH catfish: my gag reflex's mortal enemy and the only food I cannot even put in my mouth without wanting to spew.

Chocolate Chocolate Chip; Häagen Dazs Bukit Bintang

Had one of those weeks where you wake up at 5.45am every day and arrive home at 10pm almost every day and have your appetite sucked away from your stomach by the devilish creature known as Grand Lord Torturer Herr Stress (occupation: Right Hand Man of Satan), and subsist primarily on three coffees per day, each piled to the brim with an abundance of caffeine and sugar. And also potato chips (not in the coffee, obviously... though that IS an idea...). Lots of them, but only in the evening, because although your office thoughtfully started a snack food box at your petition, it is to be opened after 6pm only (silly fascist dictator dietician of a company). So I had one of THOSE weeks; you know how it is.

Then karma happened, and I got my reward for being diligent all week (I am aware it's only Thursday, but it's been a long four days):


CHOCOLATE CHOCOLATE CHIP ICE CREAM, MOFOS! Häagen Dazs finally restocked my flavour! Maybe the sad faces I made at the sales people the day they didn't have Chocolate Chocolate Chip touched their ice cream filled hearts and moved them to restock it asap. Maybe it was the sheer intensity of my desire to have not only chocolate ice cream, but also similarly flavoured chips in said ice cream, that magically brought the ice cream into the store. Maybe the shipment was due to come in anyway and had nothing to do with me? Yeah now I'm just talking crazy, it clearly wasn't the last reason.

Going to attempt to nap with my eyes open now/run off for Coffee #2 of the day.

Baked American Cheesecake and the Meaning of Life, Starbucks KLCC

Yesterday I found two raisins in my cheesecake. This is very mysterious. In my expansive cheesecake-eating experience, cheesecake doesn’t normally contain raisins. But there they were, plain as day and bold as brass and tiny and sweet as… erm… midget candycanes, hiding between the biscuit and cake layers. I am utterly perplexed. The first raisin I ate, I assumed was a mistake; that I had just imagined the raisin-flavour that had suddenly said what’s up to my tastebuds and turned up to party in my mouth. But three bites later, there was another one! And then I demolished the remainder of the cake in search of more raisins but that was it. Just the two. SO. Now we have a mystery on our hands. If there were three raisins, I’d definitely say it was deliberate. With one, I’d definitely say it was a mistake. But two??? TWO RAISINS??? What is the meaning of this, Starbucks?!


I have a feeling that when I discover the answer to this mystery I will have the key to all of life’s philosophical and moral mysteries. Maybe LIFE is a two-raisin-ed cheesecake (should be forty-two-raisin-ed, in my humble opinion) and The Person Up There sees it fit for us to ponder the meaning of why two raisins? what are raisins, really? are you sure there are only two raisins? perhaps you only perceive two raisins and they do not actually exist? but if you perceive something then is that not enough to conjure it into reality? and other such questions, while partaking dessert.

In a completely unrelated mid-morning update note, I am craving claypot chicken rice and/or gravy fries and Philly cheesesteak and/or ox tongue with fried rice with a burning passion. This may or may not be due to external factors. Danny asked me if I am currently in the throes of woman-time. Unfortunately for everyone who has to interact with me on a regular basis: I suspect we ARE nearing aforementioned woman-time (actually and mathematically this is impossible, but the alternative explanation is that I am just excessively and wantonly emotional for no good reason at all, which I refuse to believe). This would explain the inexplicable food cravings, sudden urgent need for affection and attention, and hyper-sensitive mood swings that are causing me to erupt in anger at unsuspecting people. I apologize in advance. Tell me you love me and buy me a red velvet cupcake and I promise I’ll play nice.

Here, have some more cake.

Cookies & Chocolate Ice Cream; Häagen Dazs Bukit Bintang

First of all I feel the need to point out that I LOVE Häagen Dazs ice cream more than ANY OTHER ice cream brand in the WORLD. Occasionally, I admit, I give into curiousity-induced temptation and fool around with NZ Ice Cream (too watery, not milky enough), Baskin Robbins (too sweet, not creamy enough), Ben & Jerry’s (Phish Food has MINIATURE CHOCOLATE FISH and MARSHMALLOW SWIRLS in CHOCOLATE ICE CREAM. I mean I love my HD but no mortal woman is strong enough to resist that ingenious combination) or even slum it with—gasp, I know, I am ashamed— McDonalds (in my defence, their chocolate sundaes are decent and the fudge is always heavy and sticky). But I always regret it, and I always come back to HD. It’s the fattiest and creamiest: therefore it’s the best.


That said, I was super pissed off that they didn’t have my favourite flavour today. I mean some flavours are just staples: chocolate, vanilla, strawberry. If you are Häagen Dazs, that list of staples should also include Chocolate Chocolate Chip. That is not a suggestion. It is a fact. I made sad faces at the ice cream guy and he said he was very sorry but there was nothing he could do except make my ice cream scoop extra fat. Though Cookies & Chocolate was the closest thing I could get to my beloved Chocolate Chocolate Chip, fewer things get my goat than setting my mind on eating something and not getting it in the end. This is almost as bad as the time that I went to Planet Hollywood, got the set lunch with the expectation that I would be getting chocolate cake for dessert (I even asked the waiter to double check and he confirmed that the chocolate cake was in fact the dessert of the day), and after eating a chicken lunch that I only endured in order to get to dessert, was presented with a gelatinous excuse of a mango pudding for dessert. AFTER I had set my stomach on chocolate. And when I was like where is my cake, homies?! The waiters looked at me like I was a deranged woman. Like there's no difference, apparently, to the Planet Hollywood staff, between CHOCOLATE CAKE... and MANGO PUDDING. These things are important to some people, okay! My stomach has dessert expectations! You deceived, lied to and betrayed my sweet tooth and I will not take this injustice lying down! And while I am ranting, when I ask for Coke and waiters bring me Pepsi or, even worse, Diet Coke, and I'm like dude this isn't Coke... do not look at me like I am psychotic! I don’t drink diet anything! I hate the taste of Pepsi! Because it tastes different from Coke! They are not the same!!

Must calm down now. Am getting too agitated for a Friday afternoon.

French Toast; Cafe Soho, New York

Brunch, or, as I like to call it, brizzunch, is my favourite meal, in theory and in practice. What's not to love? Having brunch automatically means you have slept in and thus missed having breakfast, so it is reasonable to assume that if you start the day with brunch, you are having a lazy day rife with afternoon naps and mindless channel surfing; plus you are pigging out and get to have a meal that is more substantial than breakfast yet is usually just as substantial as lunch... but is bundled up into one easy package! Like two for the price of one!


Brunch is that sexy forbidden love-child of the more granola (literally and metaphorically) Breakfast and the efficient workaholic Lunch. Like I know breakfast gets all this hype and rep for being "important" and "healthy", but my contrarian nature causes me to reject authority and "what is good for me", so adjectives like "important" and "healthy" make me want to pick an argument with whatever is being described in that way. In this instance the argument would go a little something like "Umm yo B-fast? So I know you're the first meal of the day and you fill an empty stomach but other than that, what's the appeal? If I wake up at 1pm and have my first meal of the day then you automatically become Lunch so obviously you're not really very clearly defined or distinct in your personality at all, I mean pick a persona and stick to it, dammit, because if you're that fickle then I'm sorry but I refuse to take you seriously. And while we're on the topic being described as "healthy" is kinda the food equivalent of someone being described as having a "nice personality and good sense of humour". In other words, it's bland and lacking and generic and if you were a person you'd probably be that awkward self-righteous nice guy sitting in the corner being like 'but I'm good for you, why don't you want to date me'.

"And Lunch, I don't want to date you either. Any mention of you is usually preceded by the words "business" or "quick", and sometimes I'd like to force feed you a chill pill and tell you to take life easy and slow down. You are always talking about work, and right after I see you, I have to go back to work and keep doing work although you invariably make me sleepy, which, honestly, is a little torturous. Yet you do this to me, like, five days a week. Logically, all signs point to you displaying signs of sadism. Sadism = Not Hot.


"So Brunch, I still like you best of all. You're slow and easy and languid. You can be savoury or sweet, or both! At the same time (case in point: French Toast and strawberries and bananas and way too much maple syrup)! You are exciting. You keep me on my toes. You also single-handedly evoked a love letter from me, which is pretty impressive. I mean, I don't care this passionately about most HUMAN BEINGS. You, my friend, are a keeper."

XOXOXOX & see you Saturday,
FEI FEI

Cupcakes; Crumbs, New York

You know that stereotype that Americans are all about size, gluttony and greed? The soaring obesity rates, the super-size-me culture, the fascination with all things fast food, the ginormous meal portions compared to... oh, just about anywhere else in the world; and on a less literal scale, the over-inflated masculine egos and correspondingly hyper-sexualized expectations for females, the insatiable appetite for fuel (though Bush has the gall to suggest that emerging markets cut down on their fuel consumption to curb rising crude oil prices, it is in fact the US that eats up more than a quarter of the world's energy consumption each year. This isn't fast food... we're talking about a NON-RENEWABLE resource), the Darwinist capitalist mentality that drives Wall St. and arguably (obviously I'm arguing the case for, if you care to speak for the other side, please contact me and we will have words) caused the summer-07 subprime meltdown and subsequent and current worldwide economic recession through which we have the misfortune to live today?

I found the culinary embodiment of this stereotype, ironically enough, in mini-mini-cupcakes. Yes people, this delicious selection of cupcakes may look like regular cupcakes, but they are, in fact, not even mini-cupcakes, but MINI-MINI-CUPCAKES. Which means that the regular cupcakes were about half the size of my face, and the mini-cupcakes were the size of my cheek. And one of these "tiny" little guys filled up my whole mouth (wait, what, it's more polite not to stuff one's face and instead take small bites?!). And I have a BIG mouth.


Oh America, land of the free and of the giant cupcakes. Everything that is associated with you is apparently larger than life, right down to cupcakes, which, by definition, are supposed to be small. Yet although I may point out your flaws, the truth is I don't care about your negative stereotypes. Because although I cannot even finish one of your regular cupcakes in one sitting and thus had to opt for the selection of mini-mini-cakes, I love that that super-large size option is even available (choice = freedom and freedom = THE ideal). For America, I too am a secretly greedy fast-food-loving capitalist (okay I know I have a blog that is all about food but my point is that it is a secret to everyone who DOESN'T read this blog) who prizes choice and freedom in the give-me-liberty-and-giant-cupcakes-or-give-me-death political vein.

The point of this post was to highlight that there is such a thing as mini-mini-cupcakes. In retrospect, the more relevant point and moral of this post seems to be that I will forgive anyone almost any fault if I am fed cupcakes.

Passionfruit Ice Parfait in a Coconut Crepe; Mandarin Oriental

The dessert otherwise known as: Block of Solid Ice That I Was Not Able to Eat Gracefully For Every Time My Spoon Tried To Chip Away at the Ice it Would Hit the Plate With a Resounding Crack. Which is a little too long and Iman-centric to fit onto a menu, so I can understand why the Mandarin Oriental named it what they did.

Usually I inhale desserts like they're pure oxygen and I just ran a 100-metre sprint, but this parfait was just too pretentious and required too much effort to eat. Passionfruit... AND coconuts... AND the self-consciously pompous tiny portion... AND an icepicking adventure upon which one must first embark in order to even ingest it?

Oh, M.O., M.O.... no, no, no. Desserts should be soft, squishy and leisurely. If I wanted a workout and an overload of tropical exoticism I'd go jogging in the jungle.